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PRANCES IDA GRACEY IN GIRLHOOD

A SALUTE TO
THE VALIANT

By WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY

FOREWORD

By
BISHOP HOMER C. STUNTZ

THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN

NEW YORK CINCINNATI

f-

Copyright, 1918, by
WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY

AUG 22 fb/B

©CI.A501591

IN TRIBUTE

To those who exalt human nature and
dignify life by that passive courage, named
fortitude, which Locke calls the guard and
support of all other virtues — courage in
comparison with which mere daring is but
casual and inconstant, desultory and flighty ;
those who for our ennobling show us that
steady patience in suffering which Milton
extols as the truest fortitude, and who in
desperate conditions come off more than con-
queror :

In tribute, further, to those who have a
heart to feel for others' woes and who min-
ister thereto :

In tribute, finally, to all who, with world-
visioning missionary minds, looking on
perishing multitudes at home and abroad,
share the spirit of Saint Paul in Frederick
Myer's poem:

" Then with a thrill the intolerable craving
Shivers through me like a trumpet call.
Oh, to save these, to perish for their saving.
Die for their life, be offered for them all."

Oh, fear not in a world like this,
And thou shalt know ere long —

Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.

— Longfellow.

O pusillanimous heart, be comforted,
And like a cheerful traveller take the road

Singing beside the hedge.
What if the bread be bitter in thine inn,
And thou unshod to meet the flints?

At least it may be said,
"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God."

— Mrs. Browning.

Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.

— Mrs. Browning.

FOREWORD

This book, in its present form, is the re-
sult of stout protest ! This protest was spon-
taneous and from wide areas. It came from
different continents and from many sorts of
readers. These readers protested against
the immurement of this literary jewel in the
editorial pages of the Methodist Review,
where its rays first flashed their light before
our gaze. Now the aforesaid Review is an
honorable publication, instituted of God in
the time of Methodism's infancy, and com-
mended of many saints as rich with thought
and freighted with literary and theological
merchandise of great price. But only rela-
tively few have the enlightenment to lay its
pages under tribute, and once the current
numbers had passed into the files, and,

"... above it, sere and swift,
Packed the daily deepening drift
Of the all-recording, all-effacing files —
The Obliterating, automatic files,"

7

FOREWORD

we who protested knew that this Salute to
the Valiant would have been offered in vain
so far as the general reading public are con-
cerned.

Saluting is an art. It involves much. Its
mastery demands definition of relationships
and practice in technique. Doubters should
visit army training camps and study the evo-
lution of the Salute. From refusal to con-
sent, and from consent to alertness in recog-
nizing those to whom the tribute is due, and
on through the stages of its development to
the quick, snappy, finished Salute of the
Lance Corporal whose heart is set on a
Sergeant's stripes or the bar of a First Lieu-
tenant, the Salute is seen as indeed an art
"not to be mastered in haste."

Fundamental to the mastery of this high
art is the understanding of mutual relation-
ship. It must be firmly implanted in the
mind of the recruit that a salute is given by
an inferior to a superior. The giving of this
tribute is the public recognition of the low
estate of the giver and the high estate of the
one to whom it is given. And just here is

8

FOREWORD

the key to this essay on the theme treated
so brilliantly, so sympathetically by Dr.
Kelley. He hastens to concede that the
really heroic in life are not always those in
whose praise the huzzas of the multitude are
heard, or on whose uniforms the medals for
"gallantry in action" are hung, amid the
crash of bands, and before the admiring eyes
of thousands. Proof follows close upon ad-
mission, and passionate pressing of the point
is the climax of this most remarkable Salute
to the obscure saints who conquer though
they die. Their superiority in all that really
matters calls for the Salute. It calls im-
periously. To deny the Salute is a breach
of life's highest discipline. The inferior must
recognize the superior.

Does any one question whether the finest
heroisms of life are to be found in sick rooms,
and in lowly places and among unnoted folk?
The cool courage of the man under the gruel-
ing test of artillery fire, or while charging
through the leaden death from machine gun-
nery, may well be the theme of poetry and
oratory; but there is a real discount to be

9

FOREWORD

allowed from the face of it when brought
into comparison with the lasting and sunny-
fortitude, undismayed and unbowed by all
the battering of physical anguish through
years of hopeless misery, which this book
undertakes to salute. The hardest test is
not when the soldier, in the thick of the rush,
makes a wild dash at the enemy. The
severest test comes when no spectators and
no companions are about, and no excitement
begotten by the battle's roar heats the blood
and fires the imagination. The test is "to
stand and be still." The Salute of this book
is to those whose lot is "to stand and be still!"
From Job to Ida Gracey discerning souls
have recognized the superiority of those who
were being made perfect through suffering,
and have given them that tribute which Dr.
Kelley calls a Salute to the Valiant. Fortu-
nate is the one who desires to offer this Salute
aright if he shall be permitted to study the
technique of the matter here. Felicitous and
commanding phrasing lure and compel read-
ing straight on to the end. Allusion and
quotation, apt, illuminating, and wide-rang-

10

FOREWORD

ing, leave amateur writers in wonder and
despair. Does the secret of such mastery
of literary material lie in copious notebooks
on the reading of a lifetime, all indexed and
cross-indexed that their spoil may be rifled
on occasion? Or is it possible to train one's
memory to carry loads like that and deliver
them on call? Answer how ye may, here lie
riches, and the author will be none the poorer
if we all help ourselves to the lessons and
really secure a truer and a finer test of valor
than we possessed before the volume passed
into our hands.

Homer Clyde Stuntz.

11

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

To Evelyn in heaven the poet says, with
lifted eyes, rememberingly :

"Your soul was pure and true.
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire and dew."

To us the poet says :

"Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!

Sit by her side and watch an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this her bed;

She left that piece of geranium flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;

Little has yet been changed, I think;
The shutters are shut, no light may pass

Save two long rays through the hinge's chink."

"Not an enticing invitation," thinks the
average human being; "what can it profit me
to sit by a dead girl's side and watch an
hour? I pray thee have me excused."

Edward IV of England created the office
of Poet Laureate, the prescribed duty of

13

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

which was to compose odes for his Majesty's
birthday and for other royal occasions.
Long familiarity with the pathetic side of
the human lot impels us to act for once as
prose laureate to a truly royal family, the
family of those who endure severe bodily
afflictions with more than royal fortitude.
We volunteer for once as annalist of in-
valids, not of the self-indulgent, languishing
sort, nor the fretful, querulous, exacting
kind, but of chronic sufferers patiently en-
during painful and incurable illness, whose
story calls upon us to exploit not the misery
but the magnificence of suffering, sufferers
who stand in noble contrast with certain sour
and moping malcontents who have really
little to complain of and much to be thank-
ful for. We know a household in which the
most afflicted member, totally blind and
totally deaf and with a full share of other
ailments, furnishes the final courage and
cheer for the family. When the others are
blue she blithely and grittily remarks, "Well,
if I can keep my spirits up, I think the rest
of you might try." Happily Providence

14

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

provides us with a favorable opportunity to
personalize in one concrete case a large and
meritorious class, known chiefly to physi-
cians, surgeons, nurses, good pastors, and
private family circles, a class which develops
hardy virtues to a high degree, hid away in
seclusion, unnoticed by the bustling, boister-
ous, healthy world — the class of patient en-
durers of prolonged physical suffering. Our
tribute, while immediately inspired by one
particular character, also intends honor to
the entire class few of whom are ever set in
the limelight. By including the whole great
class we secure spaciousness of theme and
wide warrant for our tribute, using, as type
and text for a meditation larger than her-
self, one who was vividly and modestly aware
of her class and its bravery, counting herself
only a very humble private soldier of the In-
valid Corps.

At this moment our feelings are like
those of the biographer of Adolphe Monod
when he said, "It is difficult to tell the plain
truth about Monod's almost perfect charac-
ter without seeming to exaggerate. There

15

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

was in him a combination of natural gaiety
with Christian seriousness, each balancing
the other, which made a singularly gracious,
appealing, and winning personality." Sid-
ney Lanier wrote of a certain "May morn-
ing which no words could describe unless
words were themselves May mornings." We
will endeavor to write soberly without cant
or maudlin sentimentality, and to tell no lies.
If, when the facts are set in order, they
stand, like Era Angelico's tall trumpeting
angels, blowing a eulogy, neither blame nor
credit will belong to us.

"Why, that child limps!" exclaimed a
fond father, watching his little two-year-old
toddle across the floorjn the Clifton Springs
parsonage one day in the middle-seventies.
That was what scarlet fever had done to the
baby; and this darling of the Gracey home
must go limping on into childhood, youth,
and womanhood, because no orthopedic
therapy then known could save her. Ed-
mund Clarence Stedman, after his wife's
death left him "old and lonely and afraid,"
recalled how, when he took her as a girl-

16

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

bride, he vowed that the feet of his Laura
should never tread rough ground. That
bridegroom vow he kept for fifty years. For
himself life's road was sometimes rough, yet
his stout strength held his Laura's feet above
the sharp flints and the bruising stones. But
neither strong man nor guardian angel could
lift the feet of little Ida Graeey clear of
hurt or make smooth the way for them. A
Chinese proverb says, "A lame duck should
avoid the plowed field," but the whole world
is a plowed field for the cripple. Even a
level road is uneven to the lame. Every step
is a jolt, with no shock-absorber save forti-
tude. This baby was sentenced to drag the
ball-and-chain of lameness all her life. Even
doing her spirited best to offset her handi-
cap and keep up with the sound-limbed por-
tion of mankind, it was yet her lot through
all her years to see their free swift strength
go past her, while she took, in that respect,
the dust of disadvantage on life's road. Yet
beware of pitying this maimed little maid
too much, for she had her full share of vic-
tory. She won all hearts. On the open road

17

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

of the world she was so brave and sweet a
figure that strong travelers stopped to re-
gard her winsomeness, some of whom, like
pilgrims pausing at a shrine, hung up tokens
of reverent admiration around her. It is
only fair to recognize how much loveliness
has gone limping through the world ; and
those who knew her believe that Charles
Lamb's description, "lame and lovely/' never
had fairer embodiment than in Frances Ida
Gracey, who, despite her painful infirmity,
triumphantly accomplished an active, useful,
and beneficent life.

Fortunately, that tiny craft navigating
unsteadily across the parsonage floor at Clif-
ton Springs, with a sad list to larboard, was
not altogether unprovisioned for life's voy-
age; some good stuff in the lockers below
decks. The Gracey blood was somewhat
ferruginous, enough iron in it to make an
inward brace for the crippled girl's spirit,
whatever the orthopedists might do or fail
to do outside for the lame limb. She was a
missionary's child, and glancing back along
the family line we get a glint of the racial

18

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

ore in an incident at the Philadelphia Con-
ference in 1861, when a public farewell was
given to young John Talbot Gracey, about
departing as missionary to India, which, in
those days, required intrepid faith and cour-
age. The young minister told his brethren,
in Conference assembled, how when Bishop
Simpson had brought him the call of the
church to this far distant and perilous serv-
ice, he entered upon forty-eight hours of
secret struggle to ascertain, if he might, the
will of God concerning him ; how he emerged
from that divine interview with the convic-
tion that he must regard the call of the church
as the call of God, even if it ordered him
to the ends of the earth; and how he then
went to his aged parents to inquire their
wishes. His father said, "My boy, go and
do your duty, even though you die in it";
his mother said, "O my boy, I would rather
die without a crust than that you should dis-
obey the call of duty." So John T. Gracey
and his wife, Annie Ryder — she no less self-
less and sacrificial than he — embarked for
a tedious five-months voyage in a sailing

19

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

vessel, the ice-sliip Elouisa, from Boston to
Calcutta, to reach India and labor there
seven years, amid exposures and hardships
and perils unknown there in these decades,
until broken health forced the family home,
to give, however, through all after years
their supreme enthusiasm and energies for
the promotion of the cause of missions. Thus
the blood of at least two chivalrous gener-
ations was in the veins of the baby-girl tod-
dling lop-sidedly across the parsonage floor.
Both heredity and example helped to give
her some fine qualities. She was of high
birth and breeding, born of the princeliest
sort of people living the lordliest sort of lives,
making the world a present of themselves,
seeking not personal ease, honor, or gain,
but only to "coin their blood in drachmas"
for the enrichment of mankind. From her
father especially she inherited force of will
and the gift of laughter; from her mother
especially her deep religiousness and strong
faith. "The good stars met in her horoscope,
made her of spirit, fire and dew."

Through childhood and youth this lame
20

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

girl did her best to live a normal life and
keep up with her companions at school and
elsewhere, spending glad summers in the
family cottage at the Thousand Islands
when all the woods were green and all the
waters agleam; she as spirited and lively as
the rest, flying about on her crutches, climb-
ing over rocks, chasing a runaway donkey,
boating, fishing, and catching more friends
than fish, playing coon-songs and hymns on
her banjo, and winning everybody: a fami-
liar figure often seen sitting in the sun with
bright face and wind-blown hair on the
upper deck at the prow of the "Islander,"
winding through the narrow channels among
the beautiful islands of the Saint Lawrence.
At times there were visits to New York for
surgical treatment at the hands of eminent
specialists, all unavailing to an incurable,
just as in later and harder years, when her
eyes were very bad and the famous oculist
came from Ithaca to her darkened room at
Clifton, examined and tested for an hour,
and then sat on the edge of her cot, saying
pitifully, "Well, girlie," because he knew

21

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

that in this as in her other ailments nothing
could be done to better her condition. The
instinctive cravings and hopes natural to a
girl were frustrated from fruition. Once a
deeply reciprocated love offered itself, but
she had to repel it because, as she explained
to a confidential friend, "When you're sick,
you have to shut your heart"; adding, "It
leaves an awful heartache." Her course
through life was, for the most part, painful,
like that of a fatally wounded fawn, and
recalls George Meredith's poignant and
pathetic phrase expressive of his pity for his
afflicted wife — "the running of my poor doe
with the inextricable arrow in her flank."

Her last four or five years were spent in
bed and in a darkened room, wasting away
in sufferings which grew more intense and
incessant. To the average human being an
invitation to visit such a room may not seem
alluring. Yet this invalid's chamber was a
popular resort. Here was an invalid whom
everybody enjoyed. When the progress of

22

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

disease prostrated her and confined her to
her room and bed, she said, "I will not be
cut off from my customary life and buried
before my time. This room shall be my
parlor where my friends may come as usual."
And there, until the end came, she received
both friends and strangers, often turning
strangers into friends. Visitors of many
kinds, lands, and languages sought the privi-
lege of entrance there. On a summer after-
noon when two friends sat beside her, one
said to the other, half in play, wholly in
earnest: "An admission fee ought to be
charged here, and the money given to For-
eign Missions. There are people who would
pay more for a seat at this bedside than for
a box at grand opera."

II

Not only was that room much frequented,
but also its bed-ridden occupant was a far
traveler. She "shut in"? There are no bars
for such a spirit. The missionary mind has
the world-outlook, is aware of the wide
world, and its sympathies range with its in-

23

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

telligence. That intrepid lone missionary
woman, Dr. Martha E. Sheldon, hid away
in a corner of Bhot far up in the Himalaya
Mountains on the borders of Tibet, was out
of the world if anybody was, yet was en
rapport with the human race, and wrote
vividly: "I can feel the rocking of the North
Pole when Peary touches it, and can feel
the biting wind that blows in Shackelton's
face as he toils on toward the South Pole."
Likewise this missionary-hearted girl, al-
most hermetically sealed in her room at
Clifton Springs, could hear the cries of
little cripples on the opposite side of the
earth and felt her own ribs crack when they
were beaten. In the night their moans shook
her secluded cot and sobbed themselves to
sleep upon the shoulder of her sympathy.
When the Zuni Indians were in Boston a
large reception was given them by a philan-
thropist at his home. One stalwart Indian,
feeling almost suffocated by the close indoor
air, abruptly left the crowded parlor in the
middle of the evening and strode out into
the street, saying: "Indian want room. In-

24

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

dian walk large." The missionary mind
"walks large," ranges, explores, investigates,
discovers; knows what is going on in the
world and feels fraternal toward all man-
kind, toward "Men, my brothers, men, the
workers, ever doing something new, things
which they have done but earnest of the
things which they shall do." The alert mis-
sionary mind of this imprisoned sick girl
saw and heard more through her keyhole
than some globe-trotters can bring back re-
port of from a trip around the world.

Ill

Visitors to that room found there not a
mere spectacle, but an experience. They
met with some surprises. For one surprise,
they found not a suppliant for sympathy, but
a sympathizer. With lips all primed to pour
out solicitous words you go in to inquire of
her what kind of a night she had and how
she feels to-day; but before you have time
to begin she "gets the drop" on you and pops
the question first with her quick, chipper,
"How are you to-day ?" Andbefore you know

25

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

it she throws you back on yourself and gets
you started on the one subject you are sure
to be interested in; and presently you wake
up to the fact that, instead of sympathizing
with her, you've been talking at length about
your own precious self and your affairs till
you feel ashamed. As to sympathy she
thought it more blessed to give than to re-
ceive. Well people, strong people, went to
her with their troubles ; hours and hours they
sat beside her bed to pour out their heart-
break : and they testified that she was to them
an unspeakable blessing. A young woman
whose mother died in the morning fled to
this sick girl for comfort, and spent nearly
all day fairly clinging to her. She was a
living soul and a quickening spirit, wise and
experienced in sorrow and heartache and
anguish, and knew just what to say and do
for spirits in distress. A sanitarium guest
who had heard of her, asked the privilege of
an interview. "Ten minutes," said the phy-
sician. The next time she saw him she wrung
his hand and said with tears, "How can I
thank you enough for letting me see her?

26

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

I'm a better woman forever, I'm ashamed
of myself. I could see she was suffering,
but she ignored it and talked sweetly to me
with smiles. How can she do it?" A wise
and tender Bible teacher, deeply versed in
Scripture and in the grim experiences of life,
came that way and morning after morning
talked in chapel on the "Ministry of Suffer-
ing." He taught the guests some things, and
may have hoped to teach her something. He
sat by her bedside and told her he under-
stood her lot — he had once been ill and suf-
fering for five years. But he could not teach
her anything. He was surprised to find that
she knew more about suffering and its con-
solations than he did. She had been a suf-
ferer all her life.

From some human interviews we come
away uplifted or in some way stirred;
"shaken and elate" was William Vaughan
Moody's phrase, after meeting on the ice at
sunset, on a glittering January day, a young
Irish girl, a picture of rosy health. "I came
away," he says, "shaken and elate. It is thus
that angels converse. She was something

m

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

absolutely authentic, new and inexpressible,
something which only nature could mix for
the heart's intoxication." But men and
women young and old have come away
equally "shaken and elate" from a sickroom,
proving that a wan and wasted sufferer,
prone and powerless on her pillows, may also
mix a draft "for the heart's intoxication" as
potent as the red nectar of blooming health.
"Give me health and a day," shouts Emer-
son, "and I will make the pomp of emperors
ridiculous." "Give me sickness and a night,"
this gallant girl could have said, "and I will
splendor the darkness with a radiance out-
shining Areturus and his sons, Orion and his
sword."

And we are by no means intending to
present her as superior to all her class, of
which she is taken as a fine type. Richard
Burton found a similar sufferer in Los
Angeles and wrote the following verses :

"I know a girl of presence fresh and fair.
She lies a-bed year-long, and so has lain
For half a lifetime; flower-sweet the air;
The room is darkened to relieve her pain.
28

IDA GRACEY IN LATER YEARS

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

"There is no hope held out of healing her,

You could not blame her if she turned her face
Sullen unto the wall, and did demur
From further breathing in her prison place.

"Not so; her sick bed is a throne, wherefrom
She doth most royally her favors grant;
Thither the needy and the wretched come,
She is At Home to every visitant.

"They call her Little Sister: for her heart

Goes out to each that takes her by the hand,
In sisterly devotion; 'tis her part
To feel, to succor, and to understand.

"One never thinks of woe beside her bed,

So blithe she bends beneath the rigorous rod;
She does not seem like one uncomforted,

Her prayers like songs go bubbling up to God.

"Hers is the inner secret of the soul;

Radiant renouncement, love and fellow cheer —
These things do crown her as an aureole,

Making her saintly, while they make her dear."

When that tribute appeared in Scribner's
Monthly in December, 1911, Ida Gracey's
friends who saw it were startled at the close
resemblance. All who knew her will agree

29

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

that the verses fit her perfectly. Doubtless
both these wonderful girls are exceptional,
even in their heroic class, in blending the
Spartan with the Christian virtues in a high
degree, but they typify a large and noble
class.

The man who wrote his friend, tortured by
gout, "The pain in your foot I can bear very
well" ; and Madame de Pompadour, in whom
Francis Parkman saw a similar "fortitude
in enduring the sufferings of others" ; and the
lady of whom it was said, "Herself first,
her pet dog a bad second, and the rest of the
world nowhere": these represent the all-too-
prevalent human habit. But Ida Gracey
was of those who say with Madame du
Chatelet, "I have a pain in my sister's side."
She did not spend sympathy on herself, but
on others. No one ever heard her use words
like those of Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh,
"My own self pity, like a red-breast bird,
goes back to cover all my past with leaves."
She did not imagine herself exceptionally
afflicted. Rather, she bore her lot of pain in
the spirit of Longfellow's lines :

30

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

"My lot is the common lot of all,
Into each life some rain must fall;
Some days must be dark and dreary."

IV

No one was surprised when Gladstone
called his large comfortable library at
Hawarden the "Temple of Peace." But you
are surprised at finding the chamber of suf-
fering seem like a temple of peace. You tap
on the copper-sheathed door, and a clear,
sweet voice like the voice of a child answers,
"Come." Entering you see in the little bed
a dainty girl, dark-haired, dark-eyed, im-
maculate in white robe dotted with tiny pink
bows, her mother's college-society badge
pinned at her slim throat. Knowing that
her body is often more pierced with pangs
than Saint Sebastian's with arrows, and see-
ing a hand reached out to welcome you, so
fragile you fear to touch it lest you break
the thinnest hand you ever saw, you wonder
that her face can wear so serene a smile. Sit-
ting down beside her you have the sense of
something like a benediction falling from

SI

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

her face, and you might recall how Violet,
in the story, when she was arranging the pic-
tures on her walls, said, "Let us hang the
Fra Angelico facing the door to give an im-
pression of peace and beauty to all who
enter" ; but in this room there is no need of
Fra Angelico's angels to give such an im-
pression to the visitor, the ineffably sweet
face upon the pillow being enough for that.

V

"The Little Sanctuary," one called her
room. On a Sunday morning a man past
sixty, somewhat worn by labor and sorrow,
religiously preferring her to the chapel serv-
ice, sat an hour by her bedside in the stillness
of that shaded room where the talk wandered
casually along in a peaceful sort of way,
without effort to make it particularly pious,
ending in a kind of friendly gossip about life
and folks and our nearest neighbor, God;
the interview finishing with a tiny prayer of
thanksgiving and entreaty and trust. Then
the man, tranquillized and spiritualized by
that serene interview, rose and went, saying,

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

"The dearest kind of a talk!" and mentally
naming that room "The Little Sanctuary/'
Many times it was so in perfectly simple and
natural ways to many a visitor. To watch
that sweet, white face on the pillow, while
she recited George Miiller's verses on prayer,
was a holier and more touching experience
than one has in hearing a priest intone the
litany in a cathedral. It was such a sanc-
tuary, with such a presence in it, as made one
man's mind, as he came out of it one holy
Sabbath afternoon, improvise as on an in-
strument this reverent sentiment: "White
Ida, angel of the Lord on earth, minister to
many souls, minister even to my soul, mis-
sionary to the ends of the earth."

VI

Her room at times resembled a miniature
Literary Salon, with readings of prose and
poetry, sometimes by authors from their own
works. Two friends remember a Kipling
afternoon when she listened with eager inter-
est to Kipling's "If," which she could per-
fectly understand. Times without number

m

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

she had held on when there was no strength
left in her except the strength of will that
gave the order to hold on. Likewise she was
captivated by his "Song of the Banjo" — a
song sung about itself by the banjo as
Tommy Atkins's favorite instrument, port-
able and tunable in all climates, as it was also
hers. There was a spark like valor in her
eyes when the banjo was telling how it cheers
the British soldier to the charge "when the
order moves the line and the lean locked
ranks go roaring down to die." In her most
tortured years readings from Emily Dickin-
son's quaint and naive poems and letters, the
gift of a friend, gave her keen pleasure.

VII

This invalid's room was a Center of At-
traction. Things animate and inanimate
were drawn there as if by a magnet. Flowers
had a fancy for flying to her from near and
far, Boston, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Roches-
ter, Syracuse, New York, and elsewhere,
sometimes more than there was room for.
Every spring, tiny Cecil Bruner roses, which

34

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

the fairies tended in a nearby friendly gar-
den, sent their earliest blooms to be pinned
at her slender throat. Big bunches of white
lilacs going down Main Street destined else-
where changed their minds when they came
abreast of the sanitarium and decided to go
up in the elevator to keep company with this
"Little White Lilac," as Mrs. H. W. Pea-
body called her. In May the apple trees
sent their most blossomy branches to decorate
her dainty pink-and-whiteness with their
own. White waterlilies, nodding and wink-
ing to the morning sun from the bosom of
Sodus Bay and Lake Ontario, pulled up
their long stems, swam ashore, and auto-
mobiled to Clifton to lay their virginal sweet-
ness beside hers; they the golden-hearted
children of the sun in her sunless chamber.
In October the most brilliant autumn leaves
covered her white counterpane with gorge-
ous colors. At Halloween big yellow pump-
kins sat at the foot of her bed and made Jack-
o-Lantern faces at her in the dark. All
kinds of diversions came to beguile the
tedium of invalidism. On the bed where

35

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

sometimes she writhed in torture silly Billi-
kins grinned inanely, Teddy Bears sat on
their haunches, dolls disported, tiny chicks a
few hours old and new ducklings from her
Peabody Duck-pond in West Park, funny
little bunches of fuzz, cheep-cheeped and
quack-quacked and tumbled about her pil-
lows and shoulders and neck, kittens and
puppies played and live babies crept over her
couch and cuddled down in her arms. The
little Italian boy who danced for the guests
in the foyer went up to her room to dance
and sing for her. Visitors of many kinds
who knew about her knocked at her door:
dainty little women from China and Japan,
and swart Hindu girls with glittering eyes
and blacker-than-inky hair; not a few of
what a little girl called "bignitaries" — such
as bishops and judges and senators and
authors and millionaires. A Supreme Court
judge on his way across the State to hold
court stops off at Clifton to sit at her bedside
to pay court to her. Travelers bound for the
Far East and the other side of the globe
break their journey to hold her thin hands

36

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

and talk with her an hour. A venerable
bishop waiting between official engagements
rests a week at Clifton Springs partly be-
cause of the wonderful girl of whom he has
heard. All exercises in the sanitarium chapel
— sermons, lectures, hymns, concerts, morn-
ing prayers, song services — went up the
acousticon wire to lay themselves on her pil-
low close to her keen ear.

VIII

"Hilarity Hall" was the name given her
room by one observer, who discovered that
it wajs at times a place of merriment and glee.
"Immortal hilarity, the Rose of Joy," is
Emerson's phrase, though he was never
hilarious. Sterne wrote to William Pitt, "I
live in constant endeavor to fence against ill-
health and other evils of life by mirth, being
persuaded that every time a man smiles, and
much more so when he laughs, something is
thereby added to this Fragment of Life."
"She was the j oiliest girl, and nobody else
ever could be so patient and sweet," said
the window-cleaner and vacuum sweeper,

37

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

who pushed Ida's bed about with her on it
to sweep. There were frolics and pillow-
fights with such endearing epithets as "Imp-
o-darkness" and "You scamp" hurtling
through the air, and little screams and mice-
like squeals, when a certain much loved girl-
friend, whom she called Black-and- White
Warbler and who used to go birding at
Rocky Run and over the beautiful Clifton
Springs countryside, came to have a happy
school-girl romp with her sick chum. It is
impossible to imagine two such easy laughers
as she and Bishop Warren being together
in her room for an hour without mixing some
happy laughter with their talk and prayers,
his mellow and sonorous like the vox humana
stop in a church organ; hers like the gurgle
of a rill or the thrush's liquid note. "True
laughter," says some one, "has at the bottom
of it an element of faith and something also
of love." The right kind of laugh at the
right moment is a divine intervention and
may save a mind from madness or a soul
from sin. But laughter in the chamber of
suffering? Yes, surely! Why not? J. M.

38

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

Barrie says, "The highest form of laughter
is that which is born of tragedy." Paul
Laurence Dunbar wrote, "A moan is a fine
foil for a laugh." The truth of that was
often felt in her room when sweet laughter
rippled from lips that were moaning an hour
before. John Bunny, whose name fitly
rhymes with funny and whose profession was
to make thousands laugh and cry, said, "The
good of tears is to increase our delight in
laughter." A laugh is often the token of a
triumph over tears. And Minnesota's Falls
of Minnehaha, laughing down the rocks ten
thousand years, make less music in the ears
of the angels than one victorious laugh twit-
tering on a brave sufferer's lips. Often-
times the best thing you can do for one in
distress is to make him laugh. A young girl
thought her self to be dying and made her fam-
ily think so. The doctor could not be found.
Her pastor came, sat by her a few minutes
and decided she wasn't and wouldn't.
His task was to dispel the panic. First
he offered a simple prayer, through which
ran the expectation that the momentary ill-

39

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

ness would soon pass safely by. Then he
chatted gently and naturally for a while till
the tension of that frightened young face re-
laxed ; and presently said to the child, whose
physical characteristic was extreme thinness :
"I'll come and see you again in a day or two.
You'll be all right soon. And if you take
proper nourishment, you may be the fat
woman in the dime museum some day" —
a remark so unlike its author and so unsuited
to her supposed condition as to bring a look
of astonishment if not of indignation as it
was intended to do ; but in a moment a smile
overspread that was like a silent laugh, and
the panic was gone. He sat right still. Clos-
ing her eyes, she fell softly asleep. That
was thirty years ago, and the family still say
the minister saved her life that day. One
day a friend going to Dr. Gracey's bedside
found him in doleful dumps. "How are you
this morning?" "O, miserable, miserable. I
want to go home." "Can't you say, 'All
the days of my appointed time will I wait till
my change come'?" "No, I can't. I want
to go." It was necessary to break that un-

40

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

happy mood. The friend, after vain efforts
to divert him, when the sick man fell to wail-
ing again "I want to go home," suddenly
feigned sternness and startled the patient by
asking abruptly in a loud sharp voice, "Have
you dared to tell the Lord that?" "Yes,
many a time." "What did he say to you?"
A moment's silence, during which Dr.
Gracey's sense of the ridiculous was coming
to his rescue, and then an explosive burst of
laughter as he shouted through his tears,
"He told me to mind my own business." The
misery was gone. His ship was out of the
doldrums on a shining sea, with a good
breeze swelling its sails. "I'm thankful I
haven't forgotten how to laugh," said the
venerable servant of Christ.

No friend of Ida Gracey's can read, with-
out thinking of her, De Quincey's words
about Goldsmith, "He had a constitutional
gaiety of heart which could not be bought
with Ormus or with Ind, nor hired even for
a day with the Peacock Throne of Delhi";
nor the similar words of Sante Beuve about
Cowper, "What a bright nature, eager and

41

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

open to all impressions, full of fun and
charm. At times his mirth is something like
a squirrel. But the serious side quickly re-
appears, for this lovable being has a side that
has been smitten by a thunderbolt." Some-
times our Clifton sanitarium sufferer was in
a rippling mood, and all asparkle. When
a noted purveyor of pure foods sent up fifty
dollars to her room for her humane enter-
prise in China, her wit flashed instantly,
"Why not fifty-seven to match his varieties ?"
Later, this strong rich man, expressing a
wish to see her, was admitted to her room.
When the interview was over, the nurses saw
him as he came along the corridor wiping
his eyes, wet with the kind of tears that
cleanse and freshen and recreate.

IX

A sick-room and a Health Resort, both in
one, seems an improbability; yet here it was.
A "sure enough 9 ' sick-room it certainly was
— shades drawn to keep light from eyes that
could not bear it; on the bed an emaciated
sufferer, whose agonies were sometimes

42

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

phenomenal, spectacular, paroxysmal, twist-
ing and flinging the fragile form to and fro ;
an operating room for dentist, oculist, and
surgeon ; splints and bandages for dislocated
patella; neck and face frequently bound up
with antiphlogiston ; odors of ointments,
medicines, liniments. A new medical super-
intendent who had not yet seen this particu-
lar patient, passing along the hall, heard
moans issuing from her room, and went in to
relieve her. When he came out a half -hour
later he said, "I never saw greater suffering
or greater bravery." Undeniably a sick-
room it was, scene of drastic experiences, and
as unfavorable a place for attempting to
establish one of Mother Mary Baker Glover
Eddy's rose-misty Metaphysical Societies as
was a certain Ohio home in which this was
the situation — the husband and father, a
physician, creeping slowly up from almost-
fatal pneumonia; two children in scarlet
fever, one of them with diphtheritic symp-
toms ; an aged aunt dying of senile diseases ;
the maid in bed with quinzy sore throat. To
the wife and mother in that situation there

43

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

came from an old school-friend who had
fallen victim to rose-misty metaphysics and
the hypnotic spell of meaningless words, a
letter which said, "I make haste to send you
the glad tidings; there is no such thing as
disease." A sick-room unquestionably was
Ida's Gracey's; but a Health Resort? How
could that be? Well, not a few testified that
they found it to be so. A visit to her room
was recommended by physicians, because of
the altitude and the tonic atmosphere, as are
Colorado and Asheville. Not weakening but
bracing was the air of that room. All of her
except her body, which was a very small part
of her, was contagiously healthy. Diseased
from head to feet, she was entirely healthy-
minded. She was as good for a weak heart as
a Nauheim bath. After inhaling her a while,
people came away refreshed, stimulated and
invigorated, ready to take up life with
new zest and more courage. Her room was
a kind of sanitarium in sanitario, as she was
an example of sana mens in insano corpore.
She was an antidote to what the captain of
an ocean liner called "the mollygrubs." She

44

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

indulged in neither drugs nor delusions, a
hard-headed, common-sense little realist,
temperamentally unfit for membership in
the Imagination Club. She often deplored
her lack of imagination. She had great
visions, but was no visionary.

X

This darkened room was a Business Office,
transacting practical affairs. She did her
own banking and bookkeeping neatly and ac-
curately, paying her weekly sanitarium bills
with checks drawn by her own hand, and
this up to four days before her death. That
wan, wasted remnant of a girl — "a scrap"
she called herself — helpless in bed, unable to
stand on her feet, was a "going concern,"
active and solvent, doing business twelve
thousand miles away, dealing in real estate
in China, drawing her check for $1,000 to
buy a lot in Kiukiang, and negotiating a
building enterprise on the south bank of the
Yangtze-Kiang River. She kept in touch
with the wide world. Her room was virtu-
ally a post office substation, with piles of let-

45

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

ters under her pillow and something resem-
bling a mailbag hanging over the head of her
bed; correspondence arriving from and de-
parting to the ends of the earth. That room
was like a bureau of information; like an
office of the Associated Press, the chief press
agent in residence being her sister, an eager
and expert newsgatherer, with a keen scent
for the very latest. It was called a wireless
telegraph station. " Where do you hide your
wireless apparatus? Is it under the bed, or
out on the window-sill?" asked a visitor spy-
ing to discover her secret means of communi-
cation. The very latest news from San
Francisco or Mexico x>r California, India or
China was often in that room, sometimes be-
fore the missionary headquarters in New
York had it. To some extent it was a
branch office of the Woman's Foreign Mis-
sionary Society, initiating enterprises, devis-
ing ways and means and raising money, mix-
ing prayers and plans, efficiency and econ-
omy, after the fine method of that canny and
capable society; and she herself might be
called an auxiliary. Before disease disabled

46

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

and shut her in, she had been three years
Secretary for Special Gifts in the Genesee
Conference, collecting $6,000 each year from
individual contributors, forwarding gifts to
destination, writing to and receiving letters
from each beneficiary, and making reports
to the donors. During those years she super-
intended sales of Oriental articles in various
cities for the benefit of the society's work.
For many weeks this angel of mercy on her
crutches fluttered up and down the long,
steep stairs of the elevated railroad in New
York while conducting such a sale in the
Metropolitan Life Building. For her serv-
ices and her character she was the pet and
darling of the Woman's Foreign Missionary
Society; and from year to year the great
women of the New York Branch would not
adjourn their annual convention, no matter
in what city it met, without ordering a tele-
gram of love and admiration and sympathy
to their brave helper at Clifton Springs. A
compact little business woman she was,
though all her joints were loosed. Business
men, personal friends who came from vari-

47

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

ous cities to pay honor to her, were pall-
bearers at her funeral.

Most invalids do their suffering in seclu-
sion, out of sight and unreported. Sidney
Lanier and Robert Louis Stevenson and
William E. Henley were invalids whose
prominence in the world of letters brought
their sufferings to publicity, and whose
dogged fights with virulent disease made
them a spectacle to mankind. But the little
invalid at Clifton Springs would have made
as good a showing in the limelight as they,
though she wrote only one poem in her life.
And those three strong men, had they known
her, would have recognized her and given her
the grip as belonging to their lodge and of
the thirty-third degree in the masonry of
suffering which has secrets all its own, un-
shared by the healthy, comfortable herd, in-
communicable to the uninitiated.

If she and Lanier had met in the years of
his hard endurance-test, one can easily
imagine them exchanging friendly greetings.
Perhaps he, the master musician, with fail-
ing fingers and broken breath, might have

48

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

blown her some exquisite strains from his
orchestra flute, and she, the artless girl, just
to reciprocate in kind, might have made
childlike return by strumming "Old Ken-
tucky Home" or "Way Down on De Swanee
Ribber" on her dear old banjo for him.
Then at parting, he might have repeated to
her, in the fellowship of their common faith,
words which he wrote elsewhere: "Let us
thank God, Little Sister, that in our knowl-
edge of him we have a steadfast firmament
of blue in which all clouds will soon dissolve."
Most published and popular of invalids
in our time is Louis Stevenson, largely be-
cause his own pen put in print his long fight
for life. One of his reports runs thus: "For
fourteen years, I have not had a day's real
health. I have written in bed and out of bed,
written in hemorrhage, written torn by
coughing, written when my head swam for
weakness, and thus far it seems to me I have
won. Sick or well, I have had a splendid
time of it. I was made for a contest, and
the Powers have so willed that my battle-
field should be this dingy inglorious one of

49

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

the sick-bed and the medicine-bottle. I
would have preferred a place of trumpetings
and the open air over my head, but I have
not failed." Here is another of his bulletins :
"The inherent tragedy of life goes on work-
ing itself out from black to blacker and we
poor creatures of a day look ruefully on.
Does it shake my cast-iron faith? I cannot
say that it does. I believe in an ultimate
decency of things. If you believe in God,
where is there any room for terror? If you
are sure that God in the long run means
kindness to you, you should be happy. Go
on and fail, and go on again; be mauled to
the earth and arise again, try to rest at night
with, for pillow, the half of a broken hope
that somewhere the rough shall be made
smooth, some time the balance be evened."
Here is what he wrote, when sick and penni-
less, to his friend William Archer: "To me
the medicine-bottles on my chimney and the
blood on my handkerchief are accidents.
They do not color my view of life. They
do not exist in my prospect. I see a uni-
verse, a solemn, a terrible, but a very joyous

50

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

and noble universe, where suffering is at least
not wantonly inflicted, but where it may be
and generally is nobly borne, where above all
any brave man may make out a life which
shall be happy for himself and so beneficent
to those about him." We see Stevenson, a
"knight-militant against gaunt pain," near-
ing the end, fevered and trembling, little left
of him save skin and bones, leaning breath-
less against death's doorpost, still fighting
with spirit undaunted; a gallant figure, yet
not one whit more so than the little heroine
of Clifton Springs, Those prayers which
Stevenson wrote for himself and his Samoan
household in his last years were answered in
her — prayers treasured now by devout souls
throughout the English-speaking world.
She came up from many a long hard night
"eager to be happy and to shed sunshine
round her if the day gave her half a chance,
ready to endure with patience if the day
proved severe." Friends saw her through
the years "working at her great task of hap-
piness for others' sake," and when she could
no longer move among her kind even on

51

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

crutches, she often showed, despite her weary
nights, "a glorious morning face." Finding
her so one day, her face, after hours of pain
and tears, making one think of a dripping
landscape sunlit after showers, a friend said
to her, "How can you be so bright and dear
and beautiful, when you suffer so?" "The
attack only lasted two hours this time," she
answered, patiently and cheerily. "Only
two hours" of torture! Louis Stevenson,
had he known her, would have owned her as
his peer in fortitude, and might have called
her with tender admiration "Little sister."

Pathologically W. E. Henley's case is
nearer her own than either Lanier's or
Stevenson's, since his disease was identical
with her own, a disease of the joints; and al-
though amputation was not performed upon
her as it was upon Henley, because her con-
dition made it unsafe, yet she sometimes
begged that it might be. No one could help
pitying Henley with "his leonine head and
splendid torso and those terrible twisted
limbs"; and Louis Stevenson recorded his
admiration for what he called Henley's

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

"maimed strength and masterfulness under
acute and crippling pain." Henley, in his
most famous poem, describes his attitude to-
ward life. In it he poses as model for a
statue of Defiance. Out of the night that
covers him, black as the pit from pole to pole,
writhing in the fell clutch of circumstance
under the bludgeonings of chance in a place
of wrath and tears, he boasts that his head,
though bloodied, is unbowed; he defies the
punishments of Fate and the menace of the
years. Now, all men must glory in the
valiant will of the unconquerable soul. We
feel a shiver of admiration when Henley's
friends tell us how he sat up in bed in the
hospital just after the amputation of his leg,
talking as pleasantly as if at ease in a palace ;
and how, though his whole life had been a
fight against disastrous odds, he stood at last
unbeaten on the heights of literary achieve-
ment, whither the crippled and hindered man
had climbed by dint of unrelenting toil. It
should be impossible for any one, looking
upon Henley's sufferings, to offer anything
but sympathy. We have no patience with

53

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

those of his literary friends who criticized
his poem of defiance as melodramatic, one of
them lightly remarking, "Pistol redivivus,"
and another responding, "Yes, Pistol's
Swan-song"; "Pistol" being one of Fal-
staff 's men given to spouting fragments of
tragic verse and talking large in "the
Hercules vein." For comfortable, healthy
persons to stand over an incurable sufferer
and chide or ridicule him would be despic-
able and damnable. Yet a fellow sufferer
like Ida Gracey might properly question
from her similar plight with a sufferer like
Henley, whether the attitude of desperate
or haughty defiance is the wisest and most
becoming for such as they. If her invalid's-
chair could have been rolled to the side of his
cot in the old Edinburgh Infirmary when he
was at his worst, that delicate pale slip of a
girl might have had a right to say gently to
the shaggy, broad-shouldered, square- jawed
Poet of Defiance: "Big Brother, I am your
Little Sister. Why grit your teeth so hard?
Is not submission finer than defiance, and
reverence than resentment? Is there not

54

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

more comfort as well as more dignity in
prayer than in stony stoicism?" That, or
something like it, this Christian girl might
have wished to say and have been warranted
in saying to William E. Henley. And wis-
dom and dignity would have been with her
rather than with him. A small boy whose
little brother had died went out in the back-
yard and threw stones at the sky to show his
resentment against God ; a childish act which
might be pardoned to a little boy. Kipling's
Private Ortheris went raving mad just
after he "swore quietly into the blue sky."
It was a crazy act. Resignation of the right
sort is nobler than bitter resentment. One
of Louis Stevenson's characters, having
heard talk of "a bed of pain which was a
bed of resignation" plays upon the double
meaning of the word "bed," and purposely
confusing a bed of suffering with a garden
bed, says to the Scotch gardener with preg-
nant ambiguity : "John, do you see that bed
of resignation?" "Yes, and it's doin'
bravely, sir." "John, I will not have it in
my garden. Out with it, and in place of

55

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

Resignation put Laughter and a bush of
Flowering Piety — but make sure it is the
flowering sort, John: the other species is no
ornament to any garden." Laughter and
Piety of the flowering and fragrant sort
bloomed in Ida Gracey's bed as in a garden.
Her cheerful faith was this :

"God never does, nor suffers to be done,
But that which we would do, if we could see
The end of all events as well as He."

Looking forward to increasing suffering, she
said: "I will dare to trust my heavenly
Father. I trust his word, 'My presence shall
go with thee, and I will give thee rest.'
When suffering comes he will be there, and
some time he will give me rest — rest forever/'
She indulged in no such miserable interroga-
tory as "What can it avail to tell the naked
stars the grief of man?" Rather she held,
"There is a Pity sitting in the heavens that
looks into the bottom of our grief." In that
Pity she sweetly trusted; in the divine love
and wisdom she rested, holding that "A lov-
ing worm within its clod were diviner than

56

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

a loveless God amid his worlds." Once, when
severe suffering had been continuous for a
week, a friend said, "I am praying that you
may have relief from pain." Instantly her
eyes looked up at her mother's picture on the
wall as if calling her to witness the truth of
what she was saying, as she said calmly, de-
liberately: "I've not asked to have anything
taken away. The cup that the Father giveth
me, shall I not drink it?" She had more and
better reason than Henley to thank God for
her "unconquerable soul." Although she
said some weeks before the end, "My spirit
is gone, I am worn out, I cannot keep up
the fight," as Andrea del Sarto cried, "All
the play and the stretch are out of me, out
of me," yet the spirit and fire were not gone,
they flashed up many times. Very early in
the morning of a friend's birthday, only
forty-eight hours before actual dying began,
feeling a momentary flicker of strength from
a brief sleep, she called, suddenly: "Raise
me quick. Give me pen and card. Perhaps
I can write." With a spirited flash of the
will, her trembling fingers wrote this birth-

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

day message, signing it with the name which
had been given her:

" 'May the years that lie before thee
Be o'ershadowed by God's wing:
May his presence lend a beauty
And a joy to everything.'

Is the birthday wish of Kindehen."

There flared up her loyalty to her friends.
To the very last that undying spirit showed
no sign of dying. All the play was never out
of her. To the end she was made of "spirit,
fire, and dew."

George Meredith spoke of "the thrill of
the worship of valiancy." That thrill a cer-
tain boy, deep in his books, felt in reading of
Shakespeare's young soldier Claudio, who
"in the figure of a lamb did the feats of a
lion" ; felt it over the Ballad of Chevy Chase
and the verse,

"For Witherington I needs must wail
As one in doleful dumps;
For when his legs were battered off
He fought upon the stumps":

felt it over the old battle-ballad in which Sir

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

Andrew Barton, when he was pierced, said,
quietly,

"I'll but lie down and bleed awhile
And then I'll rise and fight again":

felt it in later years over William Vaughan
Moody's wounded knight who, though facing
dire defeat, yet "blew his battle-horn across
the vales of overthrow," and upon a dark
disastrous morn made the echoes ring with
rallying and laughter; and felt it still later
over the story of Charley Edwards, of Texas,
one of the "characters" who made Washing-
ton picturesque with his broad black som-
brero, flowing mane, and far-sweeping
moustache, and such a voice that when he
whispered to the man sitting next him an
attendant of the House came down the aisle
and said, "Shouting not allowed in the gal-
lery." When a fatal and frightful malady
struck him down, Charley faced it with a
smile and through five years of agony daunt-
lessly died daily, punctuating the long grim
months with laughter, and going to the Dark
Tower like Childe Roland. Did we not all

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

feel Meredith's "thrill of the worship of vali-
ancy" over that gallant young French officer
who rode away on an errand so deadly-
dangerous that Marshal Joffre could not
help kissing the beautiful boy good-by, as he
sent him off to his rendezvous with Death?

Valiancy is not monopolized by soldiers.
A crutch may be as fit an emblem of valor
as a sword. Glaze, the African explorer,
was not a soldier, but H. M. Stanley wrote
of him, "He relished a task in proportion to
its hardness, and welcomed danger with a
fierce joy." Browning, in The Grammar-
ian's Funeral, as William Lyon Phelps
points out, makes of a plodding pedant ex-
actly the same kind of hero as a dashing
cavalry officer leading a forlorn hope; and
that pedant's example has inspired many
kinds of men to stick tight to their task, even
the man now writing. The first Valor Medal
conferred by the National Arts Club is not
given to a man in uniform, but to Elihu
Root, a patriot who never smelled the smoke
of battle. Tennyson's story of the siege of
Lucknow, after singing of Havelock and his

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

Highlanders, sings also of the "valor of deli-
cate women/' and praises their fortitude in
the hardships and terror of the assault for
eighty-seven days, while "ever upon the top-
most towers the old banner of England
blew." Those British women were scarcely
more valorous than Ida Gracey, enduring
through many years a siege far more relent-
less, with capitulation inevitable at the end
after much suffering, while ever above her
beleaguered citadel she kept the flag of her
courage afloat. F. W. H. Myers, speaking
of his friend Henry Sidgwick's gallant and
valiant nature, said: "To those hidden
fervors few occasions for outward heroism
have been vouchsafed in his quiet, peaceful
life. He had to be content with inward exal-
tations of spirit, unnoticed sacrifices, and the
secret habit of chivalric honor. Yet at length
came to him that last opportunity for val-
iancy in facing the supreme grim advance of
sure, slow-creeping death." Ida Gracey en-
dured that test for years. When you read of
England's great soldier Lord Wolseley, "In
that slight shattered body dwelt an invincible

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

force, a happy temperament, and a power
of endurance no trial ever shook nor any
stress of circumstances impaired," you may
notice that the description fits our fragile
little heroine almost as well as it fits the
famous Field Marshal. So far as we know
she spoke of herself as a soldier only once,
and that was near the end to her friend Mrs.
J. M. Cornell — "I'm a homesick soldier."
But she did even better than some soldiers,
as, for example, Colonel Francis Younghus-
band, the fine British officer who led the
"Mission to Lhassa," beyond the Himalayas
to the capital of Tibet. Seasoned and hardy
soldier though he was, his fortitude broke
under suffering when, having been run over
by a motor car, he lay broken and helpless
half-a-year on a bed of pain. His courage
oozed away, and through the long hard
months his faith let go; he concluded in his
weakness that the presence of pain in the
world rules out belief in any wise and bene-
ficent Ruler. He could conduct hard cam-
paigns and fight battles, but could not en-
dure such tests as Ida Gracey bore for years.

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And she did better thinking even in the fiery
furnace than Benjamin Jowett, the famous
Greek professor, and other comfortable
closet-thinkers did in the peaceful shades of
Oxford. They lost courage, faith in life,
and in the value of existence, as did also Ox-
ford University for a time in Jowett's day.
This she never did; she reached that chas-
tened and purified love of life which is the
noblest result of suffering and the supreme
attainment of wisdom. That much-com-
memorated tragic girl, Rahel Varnhagen,
tells us that, although, in all her afflictions,
she never was at variance with existence and
always refused to regard pain as the ultimate
purpose of life, yet, when harsh treatment
from a cruel father was added to painful ill-
ness, she "lost the courage to be happy."
Ida Gracey never lost the courage to be
happy, partly, perhaps, because she never
knew harshness or lack of love. Affection
was lavished on her all her days. In her
home she was the center of solicitude and
tenderness and sweet ministering ; and as for
friends, one said to her one day: "You were

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

made to be loved and a lot of people were
evidently made to love you. I think you
must belong to the royal family." When
she asked, "Why?" the reply was, "Because
you have such a big retinue"; and the next
day she received roses with this card: "To
her little Majesty, from a member of her
large retinue."

Dr. Richard C. Cabot speaks of "a shiver
of admiration" which persons of sensibility
experience in contact with fine characters or
in witnessing difficult feats well done. E.
V. Lucas confesses to feeling a quiver of
ecstasy over Paul Cinque valli, juggler and
acrobat, whenever he saw him doing un-
paralleled feats with almost miraculous
dexterity and ease, suppleness and grace,
until Lucas would exclaim with tears of joy,
"You Beauty! O, you Beauty!" while an-
other observer said, "Cinquevalli always
makes me cry." But suppose the juggler
had had to keep tossing hot iron balls, that
burnt him every time they came down, up
in the air for hours — what would Lucas say
then? And would the other man shed

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

scalding tears? The audience at the Gilder
Memorial meeting in Carnegie Hall felt a
shiver of admiration and a quiver of ecstasy
when Forbes Robertson read in his match-
less way Gilder's poem, "Music in Dark-
ness," the deep, vibrant masculine voice ren-
dering with perfect elocution and exquisite
modulation the lines so perfectly suited to
the psychological moment — a golden voice
filling the house with rich melody — the whole
performance being by every token high on
the list of perfect things, making one man
whisper to his seatmate, "Simply perfect!"
"You seem to think I'm perfect, just as
papa did," Ida said to a friend who after
her father's death was trying to cheer her in
the fierce endurance-tests of her last tor-
tured weeks, "Yes, dear child, I do think
you are about perfect," was the reply.

Beware of superlatives and italics is a
good-enough caution. But is there nothing
superlative in life? Why is the word "per-
fect" in the dictionary unless there is use for
it on some corresponding reality? Now and
then that risky word may be applied without

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

fear of arrest or molestation. Jane Austen
feared she had made the heroine in one
of her novels too good, and wrote a friend
about it, saying: "Pictures of perfection, as
you know, made me sick and wicked." Ex-
cessive eulogy is nauseating. But did the
author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride
and Prejudice never find any touch of per-
fection in human character and achievement?
Some have even thought they saw something
perfect in her works. What put the note of
joy and calm into Wordsworth was his
recognition of the fact that human life is
bosomed in the life of an eternal Spirit of
Perfection. The Master's command "Be ye
perfect" is guarantee that we may be perfect
in something, possibly in love, which is abso-
lutely the greatest thing in this world or any
other. The joy we have in glimpses of per-
fection is a lure to aspiration and a bribe to
all our strivings. For the Christian as for
the artist, orator, musician, or writer per-
fection must be the aim. To Ida Gracey's
friends it seemed that in character and con-
duct she approached perfection.

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

The Lady of the Decoration, who knows a
good fighter when she sees one, being one
herself, felt Dr. Cabot's shiver of admiration
when on Saint Valentine's Day she sent to
Ida Gracey (whose distinction was in being
a decoration rather than wearing one) a
token of affection with this inscription, "To
a bully fightin' Valentine, whose brave ex-
ample will brace me for many a gray day of
strife." We have heard of a cowboy who
had he known our brave little heroine and
overheard this greeting, might have shouted,
"Right you are, Mrs. Macaulay, 'Bully
fighter' is the word": the cowboy who gal-
loped gaily into town firing his revolver
into the air, filled with the frolic gladness
of his own high spirits if with nothing more
intoxicating, and who, after making the cir-
cuit of the settlement, rode up to a conven-
ient board fence, and, standing up in his
stirrups, shot into it this sentiment: "Life
ain't in holdin' a good hand, but in playin'
a pore hand well." He didn't learn his spell-
ing in school nor his figure of speech in Sun-
day school, but his doctrine was "dead right,"

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

and his bullet-in on the board fence indicates
that he would have shouted for a glorious
sick girl who all her life "plaid a pore hand
well."

William Winter wrote, "All human life
has for its ultimate object a spiritual vic-
tory." Aspiration toward that victory is
evidence of normality. Ida Gracey was
normal in every part except her sick body.
Once in the semitwilight of her shaded room
in her last year she was seen radiant with
gladness, sitting bolt upright in bed, a
slender, dainty figure, erect, elate, with
translucent face and burning eyes — like a
white wax-candle topped with flame, such as
is seen in a golden candlestick upon an altar
— telling exultantly of the almost assured
success of her plans for the Cripples' Home
at Kiukiang, about which she had prayed
fourteen years. The radiance of her counte-
nance made her friend decide then and there
to dedicate to her his book, The Illumined
Face; "To one who through years of suffer-
ing bears an illumined face." So trium-
phant was she that the friend said, "I would

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

name you Victoria if I had not already called
you something else." "That would be some-
thing to live up to," answered the spirited
girl, who, in very truth, was always "living
up to" something above her — up to the ad-
monitions of her mother's pictured face look-
ing down from the wall above the bed, with
whom her eyes often seemed communing and
consulting — up to Christian standards of
character and life — climbing toward "those
high table-lands to which the Lord, our God,
is moon and sun."

Here for a moment we pause and turn
aside, to ask whether, in always living up, she
was not a normal part of the natural uni-
verse, in every layer and level of which we
see finger-boards pointing upward and hints
of what looks like aspiration — up from in-
organic to organic, from mineral to vegetable
and animal and human and beyond. Mys-
terious and suggestive is that dreaming of
something higher ; that semblance to aspira-
tion of which we catch faint momentary
glimpses along the cosmic trend in certain
strange and curious movements of elements

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

and creatures, one range of things seeming
to glance wistfully toward the next above.
Deep in the rock's dark bosom the shapeless
minerals are taking on fronded shapes, as if
dreaming of leaves and aspiring to enter the
vegetable realm. On the winter window-
pane the frost is sketching ferns and thickets
with exquisite artistry, as if dreaming of the
next realm above and aspiring to it. In the
boggy acre the pitcher-plant is rehearsing
rudimentally the process of digestion by
feeding on insects it captures in its trap, ap-
parently striving to enter a higher order, the
order of carnivora. Parrots and magpies
are trying to talk like humans, as if aspiring.
From crustacean to man is a far cry, yet
that queer little creature, the Faira crab, of
Japan, seems to see across the gulf, for he
makes a mimicking face at man and wears
a frontispiece startlingly, ridiculously, be-
wilderingly human, as if aspiring. The
monkeys in the jungle seem aspiring to be-
come by slow stages anthropoidal. And the
scientist exhibits a picture of Mr. Pithecan-
thropus sauntering up the slopes of the ages

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

to apply for his naturalization papers in the
State of Manhood. Infinite effrontery!
But it seems to be customary in this universe.
And this upward look and urge which we
notice and which science declares, from pro-
toplasm up to personality, from mineral to
man, does not stop on the natural human
level. The scientist is the one person who
can least consistently hesitate to believe in a
higher development for the natural man into
spiritual realms. Why should man be the
first "quitter" in the ascent, the first to halt
the progress of the universe when the finger-
boards along the cosmic trend still point up-
ward? And why is it not as natural to find
the supernatural above the natural, spiritual
above carnal, as to find animal above vege-
table and vegetable above mineral? Science
is logically bound to insist that for the hu-
man being born into man's estate "The
Climb to God" is naturally the next thing
in order. In the light of all that science and
religion teach, whoever is not "living up" to
higher and better things is an abortion or a
degenerate, or a case of arrested develop-

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

merit, a kind of monstrosity in nature. When
children and grandchildren of slaves stand
in a Christian church and roll the anthem
over and over in the abysmal depths of their
bass and contralto and on the far heights of
their treble and tenor: "Beloved, now are we
the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear
what we shall be: but we know that, when
he shall appear, we shall be like him ; for we
shall see him as he is," those aspiring black
people have nothing less, but something
more, than cosmic warrant for their aspira-
tion and their exultant certitude. William
Winter and Ida Gracey, aspiring to "spirit-
ual victory" as the supreme object for a soul
to "live up to," were loyal to the System of
Things and obedient to the voice which calls
down through the universe, "Come up
higher."

At her bedside one would be impressed
with the solitariness of intense physical suf-
fering, the isolation being indicated some-
times by a look of withdrawal and remote-
ness, such as was noted in Louis Stevenson
by Mrs. Wyatt Eaton, who was on the

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

Jersey coast at Point Pleasant on the Man-
asquan, one memorable summer afternoon in
1887, when the Sanborn Cottage entertained
Stevenson, who was visiting at Brielle across
the bay. She describes him as tall and
emaciated, frail and ethereal-looking; but
gay, blithe, boyish, and contagious. Rejoic-
ing in having seen the author of Treasure
Island and The Merry Men at his best, sur-
rounded by his friends and with the light
of his best emotions on his face — lit with the
glow, the verve, the vital spark — this woman
writes: "Even in his playful mood, respond-
ing to the banter and merriment around him,
a look now and then would creep into his
eyes, like a beatitude; a look that gave me
the feeling that he was already beyond our
mortal ken." That "look like a beatitude,"
which gave us the feeling that she was in a
world beyond our ken, came at times into
Ida Gracey's face, a strange look of remote-
ness, as of a soul withdrawing to some far
height, a look, too, of ineffable dignity, which
made one almost stand in awe of her and ask
mentally, "Into what region have you risen

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

now?" To one who spoke of that look, a
girlhood friend replies: "Yes, I know that
look of dignity on Ida's face, but it did not
awe me as did her withdrawal into regions
of intense pain, leaving me with a sense of
exclusion, as if even my love could not reach
her and it seemed impossible for me to be
anything to her. Such moments were the
awfullest of all." When some one was
praising Patti's singing to Sainte Beuve, and
using Shakespeare's words, "Her voice is
like the lark, which at heaven's gate sings,"
the French critic responded, "Yes, but Nils-
son's is like a voice from the other side of the
gate." There were times when Ida Gracey
sounded from beyond, from a region above
our experience and beyond our sight. Once
when I was praying at her bedside, the feel-
ing came over me strangely that she was
nearer to God than I and that I would better
stop and ask her to pray for me.

Arthur Benson, noting the unanimity of
the tributes paid Arthur Hallam as proving
how he was admired by his contemporaries,
says that nothing but the presence of an

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

overmastering charm can explain such a con-
spiracy of praise. A similar consentaneity
concerning Ida Gracey indicates the pres-
ence in her of a similar personal charm about
which Benson says that it is beyond analysis
or description, ineffable, makes no effort to
exert its power, indeed is unconscious of it-
self, yet fills us with desire to understand it,
to win its favor or to serve it. That charm
in her, sickness only served to enhance, until
she seemed different from ordinary human-
ity, somewhat as a pearl is different from
a pebble. A mystery it seemed that suffer-
ing, instead of spoiling the attractiveness
of her face, rather refined it, made it more
delicate and spirituelle. Years of pain did
not take away the sweet girlishness, what
Browning calls "the darlingness." At the
Gracey Memorial Meeting of the Interde-
nominational Missionary Union a vivid,
vibrant, and responsive woman said quiver-
ingly and yearningly: "Ida was like my own
flesh and blood. She was ineffably beautiful
to me. Her eyes and the tender lines about
her mouth drew out my whole heart. I keep

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

her picture on my desk." One friend of her
father wrote him thus : "I saw your daughter
only once and for only a few minutes. She
seemed like a frail being from some other
world whose wings had been caught and
tangled in the thorns of our rough world —
a prisoner of hope, evidently attended by the
angels who are God's ministering spirits."
One who spent many hours at Dr. Gracey's
bedside in the years of his helplessness, said
to him one day: "If she were my child, I
should be one of two things, either as proud
as Lucifer or so grateful to God that I could
not find words to express myself. Now,
which are you?" And the venerable minister
answered tenderly, "Thankful, thankful!"
The devoted physician to whose care her
mother had committed her and who watched
over her faithfully f o^ years and saw her in
all conditions, under all circumstances, said,
"She is an angel of light." The young
woman who served as her last day attendant,
says, "She sure was an angel." Soon after
learning of her departure the pastor of a
large church in Detroit, who had known her

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

in her father's house in Rochester, wrote:
"Her pure and Christlike life will follow me
as long as I live. Last Sunday morning I
took for my Communion talk 2 Corinthians
3. 18, and then I told the story of her life.
I know of no one who more perfectly illus-
trates those words of Paul than she." The
words are these: "But we all, with open face
beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,
are changed into the same image from glory
to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord."
"You little white angel," said one who saw
her enduring acute suffering with a patient
heroic smile. "I'm not an angel," she pro-
tested, but her face was angelic at the
moment she was protesting. A girl-friend
of her early years writes: "She was a dear
marvel — such deep affection and wide help-
fulness, so many lovely ways and unexpected
turns, such humanness, with none of the sub-
dued saintlinesses that sick folk, if they are
good as she was, are apt to drop into, but
just a natural healthy human soul, such as
we all love — a difficult thing to maintain in
a sick body. Her charming innocent

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

naughtinesses were the delight of my heart."
Several months after her translation two
men, on the Pennsylvania Limited running
east out of Chicago, fell to talking of her.
One of them had known her in earlier years
flitting about on crutches at the Thousand
Islands, and the other only her bedridden
final years in the darkened room. Their con-
versation about her closed with the man from
Pittsburgh saying, "She was superman,
something superior in human quality" ; and
the New Yorker saying, "She was the fairest
flower I have ever seen blooming in a cham-
ber of suffering — and fairer in her fading
than others in the bloom of health."

Toward death she bore herself becomingly.
No man can foreknow how he will feel at
death's approach, but big Sam Johnson blub-
bering beforehand in fear of death is scarcely
a worthy or inspiring figure. When Robert
Browning, sturdiest and most robust Chris-
tian optimist among English poets, was
growing old, the decadents, debilitated by
pernicious anemia of the soul, who made art
and literature resemble a counting of autumn

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

leaves, were slowly approaching their tired
triumph greatly to Browning's disgust and
scorn, as he wrote to a friend: "Death, death,
it is this harping on death that I despise
so much. In fiction and poetry, French as
well as English, and, I am told, American
also, and in other literature and in art as
well, the shadow of death, call it what you
will — despair, negation, indifference — is
upon us. But what fools who talk thus!
Why, amico mio, you know as well as I that
death is life, just as our daily momentary
dying body is none the less alive, and ever
recruiting new forces of existence. Without
death, which is our church-yardy crape-like
word for change, for growth, there could be
no prolongation of that which we call life.
Never say of me that I am dead." When
past fourscore Browning spent much time
in lovely country-places, and of one long
visit wrote, "Another term of delightful
weeks, each week tipped with a sweet starry
Sunday at the little church." In the little
church he was not thinking gloomily on
death, but joyously on everlasting life. We

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

hear Stopford A. Brooke saying in his quiet
London study, "I expect the day of my
death to be the most romantic day of my
life." We see George F. Watts, when his
final days seemed only looking in on him one
by one just to say "Good-by," tranquilly
expecting the coming of the white-robed
angel he had once painted as Death, saying
calmly to his wife, "I often catch sight of
that white figure behind my shoulder, and it
seems to say to me, 'I am not far off.' " We
find Lewis Carroll, nearing the end, feeling
it would be nice to have it over with, writing
his sister: "I sometimes think what a grand
thing it will be to be able to say to oneself,
'Death is over now and there is not that
experience to be faced again.' ' We read
in Edwin Booth's letter to an afflicted friend:
"I cannot grieve at death. It seems to me
the greatest boon the Almighty has granted
us. Why do you not look at this little life
with all its ups and downs as I do? At the
very worst, 'tis but a scratch, a temporary
ill, to be soon cured by that dear old doctor,
Death, who gives us life more healthful and

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enduring than all the physicians can give."
George Washington has told us that when
facing death in battle he found something
strangely fascinating and exhilarating in the
sound of whistling bullets that meant death.
Charles Frohman, on the slanting deck of
the sinking Lusitania, said to those who with
him would all be drowned together in a few
minutes: "Why fear death? It is life's most
beautiful adventure." Sir James Paget, the
eminent English surgeon, is even of opinion
that there is often a certain physical pleasure
in dying. All the poised composure seen in
these calm spirits was in Ida Gracey, and
something more. Death was an old familiar
friend ; the two had been neighbors and com-
rades for years. They had played tag along
the border. She often said, "Why, I'm no
more afraid to die than I am to put my head
on my pillow." She dreaded intense suffer-
ing, but she no more dreaded death than she
dreaded her father's kiss.

When the end drew near, and especially
in her very last hours, she was her own sweet
self, perfectly natural, cool, composed, fear-

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

less, glad. She calmly noticed advancing
symptoms and understood all that the signs
meant, and when the inhalation of oxygen
was begun she knew it was the physician's
viaticum, the last thing done for the dying.
In a quiet moment of the final night she said
to her sister: "Don't you think I've had all
my pains and can go to heaven now? Would
it be cowardly for me to ask to go to-night?"
In hours when her room was an outpost of
eternity, she was not only cool and serene
but playful. Her sister needing to go out
in the rain, asked, "May I take your um-
brella?" "Why, yes": and then a flash of
humor, "I think I can spare you my rub-
bers too." She knew she might be in heaven
any minute. Umbrellas and rubbers are not
needed on the streets of the City of Gold.
That blithe spirit, done forever with um-
brellas and overshoes, was hovering merrily
and unabashed on life's outer rim, and that
gay touch of gentle play with her sister was
like a last caress reached out to the playmate
of all her years.

After physicians had given Amiel his
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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

death-warrant, he was dying by inches and
knew it through seven long years. The fol-
lowing record in his journal in his last weeks
is precisely descriptive of her last weeks: "A
terrible night. For four hours I struggled
against suffocation and looked death in the
face. It is clear that what awaits me is
suffocation. I shall die by choking. I should
not have chosen such a death, but when there
is no option one must simply resign oneself.
'Thy will, not mine, be done.' ' Ida's last
suffering was like Amiel's. "It's terrible,"
she said, appealingly, as she strangled in
agony; and then, lest she be misunderstood,
"I don't mean to complain."

Her last word and Bishop Mclntyre's
were the same. In the Chicago Hospital
Mrs. Mclntyre bent over her husband in the
quiet lull which looks like improvement but
precedes dissolution, and said, to cheer him,
"We'll soon be going home, Robert."
"Lovely!" he answered — his last word ere
his heavenly "going home." On Ida
Gracey's last night, her sister, bending over
her, spoke of a small sum of money left by

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

their mother and asked, "Don't you think it
would be nice to put it into your cripples'
fund, as mother's contribution?" (The first
gift she received toward this had been from
her father, and now the last while she is alive
is from her mother. ) "Why, yes ! Lovely !"
Then the final silence, and a little later she
was gone. This lifelong cripple and the
famous bishop ended on the same high note,
the note of joy, he thinking of the return to
the comfort of his own home, she full of the
joy of giving a Home to poor friendless lit-
tle cripples by the thousand in the long years
to come. It was lovely to go home ; lovelier
to give a home.

Emily Dickinson wrote of her dearest:
"There was no earthly parting. She slipped
from our fingers like a snowflake gathered
by the wind." Robert Browning wrote of
his Elizabeth: "God took her to himself as
you would lift a sleeping child from a dark
uneasy bed into your arms and the light."
So was it with Ida Gracey. Without shiver
or quiver or sound she slipped away. One
thinks of Emily Dickinson's childlike verses:

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

She went; this was the way she went:

When her task was done,
She took up her simple wardrobe

And started for the sun.

Her little figure at the gate
The angels must have spied,

For we could never find her
Upon thfe earthward side.

A startling accompaniment attended her
midnight departure. Lightnings were flash-
ing and thunders crashing at the moment of
her going. Jean Ingelow would say, "God
Almighty's guns were going off and the land
trembled." The artillery of the skies seemed
firing a Salute to the Valiant, as if heaven
thought fit to honor with a soldier's music
and the roaring rites of war the passing of
this intrepid soul, who went up past the great
guns of the thunder unafraid. Her soul well-
knit and all her battles won, she mounted
surely to eternal life, more than conqueror
through Him who loved her and gave him-
self for her. And thus was brought to pass
the saying which was written, "Death is
swallowed up in victory."

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

Of George Meredith's face in the coffin
it was written, "The dead lips smiling at life
as in life they had smiled at death." Not
so hers. A weary look was on the sweet
marmoreal face in the pearl-gray casket,
wearied by long and wearing pain. Stand-
ing beside that casket and looking on the
tired but lovely face, the minister read with
inward surge of exultation from the book of
Revelation the words of the great voice out
of heaven, in this accentuating repetend
fashion, "Behold, God shall wipe away all
tears from their eyes; and there shall be no
more death — and there shall be no more
death; neither sorrow nor crying — neither
sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any
more pain — neither shall there be any
more pain." At the cemetery on the hill
this thanksgiving rose on the still air of a
balmy springlike February afternoon: " Al-
mighty God, with whom the souls of the
faithful, after they are delivered from the
burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity,
we give thee hearty thanks for the good ex-
ample of this dear child of thine, who, having

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finished her course in faith, now rests with
thee." And upon the sorrowing group was
pronounced this benediction: "Now the God
of peace who brought again from the dead
our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the
sheep, through the blood of the everlasting
covenant, make you perfect in every good
work to do his will, working in you that
which is well pleasing in his sight, through
Jesus Christ ; to whom be glory forever and
ever. Amen." Thus, in the stately Christian
fashion, with supernal pomp of lofty lan-
guage, was laid away that light little body,
a "scrap," she said, a remnant of skin and
bones, sealed eyes and lips, and long dark
hair; like the burial of a dead bird, or
withered lily or crumpled leaf. The grave
is filled and the flowers piled upon it, a red
cross surmounted by a white crown standing
highest. The procession winds silently down
the slope, out the gate and back to the duties
of life. And "thus endeth." No, not quite.
Rather, "here beginneth." Behold, I show
you a miracle.

The curtain rises now on one of the most
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pregnant and meaningful tableaus ever set ;
one of God's own romances woven of actual
events in which all the elements are mixed to
give the world assurance of the presence of
a superhuman artistry that makes theater
plays seem wooden, mechanical, clumsy, and
infantile.

After the burial, the monument. Her
monument is not here, but a world's-width
away, at Kiukiang, a walled city of 40,000,
on the south bank of the Yangtze, situated
between river, lakes, and hills. There is the
oldest mission of our church in Central
China. During fifty years an influential
Christian community has been established
there by the building of Rulon Fish High
School, William Nast College for boys, Dan-
forth Memorial Hospital for Women,
Knowles Bible Training School for girls;
and, now, Ida Gracey's Home for Cripples
(attached to Dr. Mary Stone's hospital, as
its orthopedic department), and soon Dr.
Edward C. Perkins's Water-of-Life Hos-
pital for Men.

We pause to note that the Cripples' Home
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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

is one of the by-products of suffering, and
came by one of God's rough main-traveled
roads along which he often sends his cara-
vans of relief and blessing. They who, them-
selves, have trodden with bleeding feet the
Via Crucis know best how to pity. Thack-
eray wrote: "Most likely the Good Samari-
tan was a man who had been robbed and
beaten on life's road and knew what it was
to lie stripped and bruised by the wayside."
The superintendent of a large hospital re-
ports that most of the gifts for buildings
or endowments come from bereaved or other-
wise afflicted people. It is said that most
of the improvements in artificial limbs have
been invented by the first man who lost a
limb on the Confederate side in our Civil
War. Out of his crippled condition benefits
have emerged for thousands of maimed. Out
of Senator Leland Stanford's loss of his only
child came limitless benefit to endless genera-
tions of boys by the building of Leland
Stanford, Jr., University. Out of A. R.
Crittenton's loss of a loved daughter came
his impulse to father thousands of friendless

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

girls by the establishment of Florence Crit-
tenton Homes in near a hundred cities for
a class most in need of true friends and least
likely to have them. Out of George Mathe-
son's bitterest hour of anguish comes one of
the great hymns of the ages to comfort the
anguish of countless souls with the "Love
that wilt not let me go." Joyce Kilmer says,
"Lips that have not kissed the rod breathe
only light and perishable breath; they only
sing who are struck dumb by God." It was
because Miss Sullivan had suffered an at-
tack of blindness lasting several years that
she was moved with sympathy toward a little
blind deaf-mute child in Tuscumbia, Ala-
bama; whereby Helen Keller got a teacher
who brought her out of darkness into the
marvelous light of a wonderful life. And to-
day, amid the horrors of the most hideous,
atrocious, and diabolical of wars, it was in-
evitable that blind Helen Keller's relief-
money should go to those soldiers whose eye-
sight has been destroyed; her gifts accom-
panied by words like these: "From the mist
which surrounds me — dark, endless, and im-

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

measurable — I stretch my hand to those
brave young men whose light has been put
out by shells. I cannot rest until I have done
all I can in order to help them from misery
and desperation." Robertson Nicoll says,
"In order to understand Louis Stevenson
one needs to spit a little blood." It was be-
cause Ida Gracey knew all her life what it
is to be lame that her pity went out to crip-
ples, and to China, the land that is fullest of
cripples, so that this empty-handed girl
cherished for fourteen years a wild dream of
building a home and hospital for the most
friendless of her own afflicted class. When
finally she dared announce to her friends her
plans, and that the practical women at the
head of the Woman's Foreign Missionary
Society had approved them as practicable,
if only money enough was forthcoming, gifts
began to come in. Wealthy women, guests
in the sanitarium, gave some of their jewelry
for her project. The medical superintend-
ent brought his baby girl with a big gold
piece clutched in its tiny fist to drop it on the
invalid's pillow. It became fashionable to

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

do something by contributions or sales for
this lame girl's angelic enterprise. Her
pretty Peabody ducks, with rainbows round
their necks, in the duck-pond in West Park,
laid eggs and hatched their broods for it.
Like David, she had it in her heart to build
a house unto the Lord — a House of Mercy.
Like David, she died without seeing its com-
pletion, but not without the joy of assurance
in her heart. A friend said to her, "If you
go before the money is raised and the build-
ing erected, and I survive you, I will watch
over your project and see it through." Not
very long after this little lame soldier "went
west," her brave enterprise "went over the
top" to victory. By the cooperation of many
friends the building now stands complete,
paid for, and full of little cripples, for whom
it is a home, a hospital, and a school. It
needs only endowment to carry current ex-
penses. There is plenty of ground for en-
largement when needed. Many of the crip-
pled children can be cured, their deformities
rectified by orthopedic surgery in Danforth
Hospital. The plot of ground Ida coveted

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most for a site was desired for two reasons;
because it was adjacent to Dr. Mary Stone's
hospital, and because it belonged to a China-
man and on it was a pond or pool used by
the Chinese for drowning babies. Infan-
ticide is frightfully common in parts of
China. A Chinese woman recently told one
of our missionary workers, with entire sang
froid, that she had drowned seven of her
own girl babies. That lot was purchased,
that horrid pond filled up, and on the lot
stands to-day a solid and convenient edifice
on the front of which friends have placed
a tablet of enduring brass, "The Ida Gracey
Home for Cripples." When Miss Jennie
V. Hughes, head of the Knowles Training
School for Girls, cried joyfully to us from
the antipodes, "The Gracey Home for Crip-
ples is completed. How radiantly happy
Ida must be in heaven!" this was the mes-
sage sent up by spirit wireless:

"While well you fare in God's good care
Somewhere within the blue,
You know to-day, your dearest dream
Came true — is true — all true."
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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

As a rule the members of the heroic invalid
class suffer unnoticed and slip unobserved
out of life's backdoor into oblivion. We
have thought fit to set her and her class for
a moment where they belong, in full public
view, among the valiant. In that tremen-
dous masterpiece of portraiture, the Ring
and the Book, the Pope offers A Salute to
the Valiant in his declaration that Pompilia
through all her tragic sufferings is a greater
victor than Michael the Archangel with his
sword and shield and spear, and that all the
valor of the world's warriors cannot match
the marvel of a soul like Pompilia's.

We have also classed Ida Gracey with
notable benefactors. When a railroad mag-
nate, having helped to loot a railway system,
puts some of his millions into a Home for
Cripples, the newspapers headline him as a
noble benefactor ; but this simple, unpretend-
ing girl, whom no newspaper headlines, is
far more noble and more beneficent. And
the Home for Cripples at Kiukiang is more
wonderfully beautiful in the eyes of the
angels than the Robin's Nest at Irvington-

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

on-the-Hudson, supported by Vanderbilts
and Rockefellers. A beautiful little Chris-
tian philanthropist was she, in comparison
with whom the richest woman in the world,
gloating greedily over her hoarded millions,
must be regarded as a scaly, sordid, and
gluttonish creature crawling crookedly in
the muck ; the memories of the two differing
as a fragrance from a stench. So the human
race would vote.

We have not exaggerated. Ruskin
twitted G. F. Watts, painter of portraits,
with turning his sitters into angels though
they were mere humans. But Lady Hol-
land said to Watts, "I never really know
my friends till you have painted them." We
are apt to be skeptical about the greatness
of our contemporaries. George William
Curtis said, in his eloquent lament over
Theodore Winthrop, " Heroes in history
seem the more heroic because they are far
off, haloed by distance. But if we should
tell the plain truth about some of our every-
day neighbors, equally heroic, it would sound
like high-colored fiction." Age and experi-

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

ence should not wither one's enthusiasm for
humanity. Professor Seelye, in his "Ecce
Homo" forty years ago, affirmed and en-
deavored to show that the crowning distinc-
tion, the most fascinating trait, of the Man
of Galilee was his enthusiasm for humanity.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead as
never to himself hath said :

"How beauteous mankind is!
O brave, good world that hath
Such people in it"?

In W. L. Watkinson's Gates of Dawn, the
passage for March 21 (Ida Gracey's Birth-
day) is: "He was transfigured before them,"
with this pertinent exclamation following,
"What possibilities of glory there are in hu-
man nature!"

We have not over-labored our theme.
Our meanest and dingiest danger is that we
may be too dull to appreciate those with
whom we live, the only ones to whom ap-
preciation is of any value. This brave girl
is far more worthy of this, our modest In
Memoriam, than Arthur Henry Hallam

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

was of the thousand verses from England's
greatest laureate in the longest, most elabo-
rate, and most labored threnody ever com-
posed, on which Tennyson labored more than
seventeen years in eulogy of one in whose
portrait A. C. Benson sees "a heavy-fea-
tured young man with a flushed face, who
looks more like a country bumpkin on the
opera-bouffe stage than like an intellectual
archangel."

The Thebans had a law commanding
artists to make their statues more beautiful
than the model. We have not done that, but
if we had, it would not have been, artistically,
a crime.

What was it this prostrate, helpless, suf-
fering sick girl really achieved? We will
paint the thing as we see it, for the God of
Things as they Are. Not much imagination
is needed to visualize and dramatize what
essentially happened there at Kiukiang. The
tableau is like this: Pagan mothers throw-
ing their babies into a loathsome pond to
drown and float, to swell and rot and stew
stenchf ully in the sun ; the demons of cruelty

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A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

which infest that Land of Dragons and
devour both bodies and souls almost visibly-
squatting around the margin, their jaws
dripping with the putrid hell-broth. Above
this fetid feast of fiends, hovering in the
sky on wings of Christian pity, the spirit
of a seraphic girl, friend of the friendless,
helper of the helpless, who with one wave
of her white hands frightens away the fiends ;
and, as if by miracle, up from that grisly
ground there rises red the divine fulfillment
of a sick girl's dream, to be a shelter of
mercy and love for poor little hated and
devil-hunted cripples through many genera-
tions. Secretary F. M. North, of the For-
eign Missions Office, looking upon that noble
Christian settlement at Kiukiang, wrote:
"The grouping of Christlike service in and
about the Danforth Hospital is one of the
finest expressions of missionary beneficence
and devotion I have ever seen." The cluster
of buildings which house that humane set-
tlement is among the solidest of Christian
evidences. The work done in and the influ-
ence radiating from that great center of

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beneficent activity constitute an enormous,
far-reaching, and convincing evangelizing
force. "What think ye of Christ, who brings
you such great gifts of mercy and love, health
and knowledge, enlightenment and peace?"
is the question that flies abroad on every wind
that blows over that whole region. As a re-
sult of an operation on a crippled boy patient
in one of the Chinese Mission hospitals,
ninety people of his village came seeking the
" Jesus-religion."

Browning devotes a thrilling and en-
nobling poem to commemorating the simple
deed of a poor young coasting pilot, who,
happening to know the channels and being
of the crew, took the flagship's helm and
steered the French fleet, chased by enemies,
safe to port; and who, when asked by the
admiral to name his own reward, only re-
quested a whole holiday, leave to go and see
his wife whom he calls the Belle Aurore. Not
finding that humble hero's name carved upon
the Louvre or any public place, the poet de-
cides to put that name upon his pages, say-
ing:

A SALUTE TO THE VALIANT

"So, for better or for worse,

Herve Riel, accept my verse;

In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more

Save the squadron, honor France,

Love thy wife, the Belle Aurore."

The name of the valiant little invalid of
Clifton Springs is not numbered in "the thin
red line of 'eroes when the drums begin to
roll"; it is not even in the foolish pages of
"Who's Who?"; but it is stenciled now on
these pages.

And it has its place in the sun graven upon
an enduring tablet on the front of the Ida
Gracey Home for Cripples in the city beside
China's great river at Kiukiang where grace,
mercy, and healing will soon be flowing from
the Water-of-Life Hospital, as already for
many years from the other noble institutions
grouped in that shining center of Christian
beneficence.

And yonder in "the land which is very far
off," where her eyes "see the King in his
beauty," in the City of God by the River of
Life, one page in the Lamb's Book of Life
shines with the pearly luster of the name of

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Frances Ida Gracey. The angels love the
very letters of that name.

Coordinate with "Blessed are the dead who
die in the Lord. Yea, saith the Spirit,"
Carlyle framed a complementary beatitude:
"Blessed are the valiant who have lived in
the Lord. Amen, saith the Spirit."

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